Old Kingdom of Egypt

The Old Kingdom spans Egypt's Third through Sixth Dynasties, conventionally dated from around 2686 to 2181 BCE, and is remembered above all as the age of pyramid building. Djoser's Step Pyramid at Saqqara, designed by the official Imhotep in the Third Dynasty, was the first large stone monument in Egyptian history and set the pattern that culminated in the Fourth Dynasty with the true pyramids of Sneferu at Dahshur and, above all, the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, built as the king's tomb and the physical expression of his claim to an eternal afterlife among the gods. The pyramid complex, with its mortuary and valley temples, causeway and subsidiary structures, mobilized a workforce and an administrative bureaucracy on a scale unmatched anywhere else in the contemporary world.

Royal power weakened through the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties as provincial governors, the nomarchs, accumulated local authority and their own funerary resources, a shift visible in the increasingly modest scale of royal pyramids set against increasingly elaborate provincial tombs. The Old Kingdom ended in the political fragmentation of the First Intermediate Period, a collapse Egyptian tradition later blamed on the exceptionally long reign of Pepi II and which modern scholarship also links to a weakening Nile flood cycle. The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, edited by Ian Shaw, remains the standard modern synthesis of the period's political and building history.

Old Kingdom theology fused kingship with the solar cult of Ra, whose priesthood at Heliopolis grew immensely wealthy and influential as successive kings styled themselves Son of Ra and built solar temples alongside their pyramids, particularly under the Fifth Dynasty. The king was also identified with Horus while alive and with Osiris, god of the dead, once buried, a double identity that structured Egyptian kingship for the rest of pharaonic history. The pyramid itself was conceived as a mechanism for the king's ascent to join the imperishable circumpolar stars and to sail with Ra across the sky, an afterlife reserved for royalty alone in this period.

That theology survives in the Pyramid Texts, first carved into the burial chamber walls of King Unas at the close of the Fifth Dynasty and continued under his Sixth Dynasty successors, making them the oldest substantial body of religious writing preserved anywhere in the world. The texts are a loose collection of spells, hymns and ritual utterances meant to protect the king's body, feed his spirit and guide him past hostile beings on the journey into the sky, rather than a single composed scripture. Raymond Faulkner's translation remains the standard English edition. Access to this afterlife literature broadened only after the Old Kingdom's collapse, when Middle Kingdom officials adapted the same spells, now called the Coffin Texts, for their own burials, a democratization that later Egyptologists have read as one consequence of the weakening of royal authority the Old Kingdom's own history had already set in motion.